Ten Wasted Years: The Crash One Decade On

This summer has seen the start of the discussion about the 10th anniversary of the financial crisis. It’s a discussion that will continue through to autumn next year. To recap, it was on 9 August 2007 that the French bank BNP Paribas announced that the ‘complete evaporation of liquidity in certain market segments of the US securitisation market’ had ‘made it impossible to value certain assets fairly’. This blunt admission by BNP Paribas that it could no longer price, and therefore redeem, investments in three of its funds triggered a breakdown in trust between financial institutions.

As a result, the wide diversification of repackaged debt around the financial system, which had previously been heralded as sound ‘risk management’, backfired. No one seemed to know which bundles of paper were worthless, so none could be relied upon. Credit markets began to freeze up.